All contestants:
Finroo
Location: boston, Massachusetts 02115, United States United States
Founded in: 2009
Stage: 1.0 (formal launch)
Number of employees: 1-5
Profitable year: already profitable
Short URL: vator.co/Finroo-you-think-your-good-enough
Admins (1)
Followers (17)

Finroo

Swim against the tide
Startup/business
Massachusetts, United States United States United States
http://www.finroo.com
About
Company description

Finroo is a high-end apparel company enabling fashion conscious consumers to purchase limited edition clothing designed by a worldwide network of graphic artists.  Our online platform gives consumers access to thousands of designs and enables artists to increase visibility and sell their work as wearable art.

 

The custom online apparel market is in its early stage with little differentiation between competitors.  With Finroo’s limited edition branding, high quality products and top tier artists, customers will see no reason to spend their money elsewhere.  Recognizing the importance of branding and buzz, Finroo has already demonstrated its appeal to influence leaders in its target market with articles in internet publications like Thrillist (300K monthly hits), Clothingwire and T shirt Magazine (8k monthly hits each).  Our first product is a limited edition Bamboo shirt which has its actual number of print inside the shirt.

 

 

 

Team

Eric Yohay, President - Prior to Finroo, Eric launched Orecovery an asset recovery management company specializing in assisting distribution companies with their stressed assets.  It is there where he worked on “getting product paid for and shipped” as well as learning and testing the fundamentals of e-commerce.

 

Christopher Curwen, Director of Artist relations - Blake Curwen has an award winning business development background, with additional experience as a consultant and project manager. He has worked in telecom, logistic, and medical devices, and plans to become an E-commerce guru... All in due time.

 

Kevin Sandhu, Head Operations Manager - Kevin is a recent MBA graduate from Babson College, who has strong skills in marketing, sales and operations. He believes his skill set and interest in urban fashion combined with Finroo’s offerings will lead to success.

Business model

Finroo allows artists to upload artwork for consumers to purchase.  Once a consumer purchases a product, a $4 commission is given to the artists, $1 is written off to the charity and the remainder is our profit minus our COGS.  All products are made to order and we print on demand.

 

Our go to market strategy has been targeting two groups, artists and consumers.  Artists are given all the tools for self promotion and consumers are targeted through:

 

1) Blog/PR/newsletters buzz – Finroo has seen a positive ROI in any newsletter mention and positive traffic and sales from blog referrals.  We are currently contacting Bloggers to work in paid advertising and contest sponsoring.

 

2)  Affiliate resellers – Finroo has seen a spike in traffic as we use our affiliate program.  Incentives and tools are in place to make this a profitable sales arm.

 

3)  Artists self promotion – In addition to purse amount given to artists as a form of compensation, we update and educate our talent pool weekly.

 

4)  Accessing targeted demographics through the use of collaborations and promotions – By creating targeted co-marketed events, we have seen an influx of users as well as sales.

 

 

Competitive advantage
Today’s custom online apparel market can be broken into two categories, Category Killers and Ongoing design competitions.


 Category Killers – CafePress, zazzle, redbubble, spreadshirt.  These companies use new printing technologies to be able to print on demand but by allowing all categories and artist levels and lacking social collaboration, consumers have to go through countless pages to find something they would purchase.
                                                          
Ongoing design competitions – Threadless, Popdeck, desired hearts, design by humans.  These companies almost always sell out of their top products but by only utilizing the top 1% they miss 99% of their user submissions.
 
Finroo is different
By combining the printing technologies of the category killers and social media display system of the ongoing design competition plus an incentive model for selling out SKUs, Finroo capitalizes on the best of both worlds.  This provides an immense value for our artists (inputs) and customers (outputs) resulting in one thing:  profits

 

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